‘I was in one of the sex chat rooms and accidentally pasted a recipe for how to cook a baby shark in the chat window but caught it in time,’ wrote Miranda July in her dream journal, as shared via her Instagram account. As for me, I don’t remember any details from the dream I had last night. A glimpse of a bedroom in a London house? Worn-out carpet in an open-plan office? It’s hard to say whether I saw these places or whether they are standing in for things my waking mind could never describe. I do recall a feeling usually absent in dreams, which is that of knowing I have a past. The insouciant certainty that I haven’t always lived where I do now, or earned an income in this way, or been in the relationship I am presently a part of. That at any time I choose I can bring to mind former places and the people who inhabited them. The dream contained this feeling, but in relation to an alternative life. I can still feel the sense of it being buried inside me, as if it has the potential to replace the life I’m looking at, and remembering, now.
There is a map on the wall of my apartment. I bought it twelve years ago from an indoor market in East Dulwich. It’s a colour reproduction of a 1927 Stanford’s map of central London, the boundaries of which it defines as Acton Park in the west, Highbury Fields in the north, Victoria Park in the east and Clapham Common in the south.
Mostly it consists of black lines and letters on salmon paper, except main roads are depicted in Persian orange, parks are lime green, and rivers and reservoirs are Air Force blue. Pleasingly, the map just about reaches Peckham Rye Common, meaning it acknowledges every corner of London where I have lived: Clerkenwell, Peckham, East Dulwich, Kentish Town.
Would I have bought it otherwise? If it had cut off South London slightly to the north? Unlikely. There is a particular kind of satisfaction I get from standing in front of the map, which is not just a generic pleasure to do with the way London is organised, but one relating to me personally, to my remembered life.
* * * The Arm of the Leather Chair
When we look out from high places, our first instinct is to find the so-called attractions – Big Ben, the London Eye or the Shard – but after that we will always map a more intimate story over the landscape. Where are the places I have been? Where is home? Where is work? Because a map offers an even more severe level of abstraction when it is presented to us in a decorative setting (now the primary use for printed maps), we tend to disregard the location of the Eiffel Tower and hone in on those places with which we have a personal relationship.
Is this disingenuous when examining a map designed in 1927? My grandparents only ever lived north of Highbury or south of Clapham, but I suppose they would have emerged here or there onto the streets depicted, which do, by and large, have the same names as now: I could get around town with this map. I can find Fortess Road, where I lived with three others above a shop with many staff but barely any products to sell. Or Peckham Rye, named after the park in which William Blake saw visions of angels. The tiny flat I shared there with a friend overlooked that park, and we could see the curious crowds amidst the whiteness of a snowstorm one day, and my then-girlfriend sat on the arm of a leather chair and said it was the ‘best seat in the house.’ I can see all that, when I look at the map.
There are certain turns of phrase the map uses, like the large green space just north of Barnes called ‘Civil Service Sports Ground,’ or the patch of water entitled ‘Reservoirs. West Middlesex District Metropolitan Water Board.’ Behind the management-speak is a kind of namelessness, the same namelessness that might apply to any arbitrary shrub or patch of gravel, and which applies to us all, in the end. Part of the pleasure of escaping the city is to no longer be faced with the incessant named-ness of things. Part of the excitement of sex is the way that our own named-ness, and that of the one we are with, falls away (perhaps when lovers cry out one another’s names it is out of fear they will otherwise be lost forever).
The map is made flesh when you arrive in an unknown city. All those taxi drivers, cabaret theatres and no-context-political-posters. How often you turn to your companion and say, ‘I can’t believe this has been here all this time without me.’ I was caught by surprise by Bordeaux, which I’d assumed was a kind of oversized vineyard. I was shocked by the concrete streets of Lahti in Finland, and startled by the rain and traffic in Potsdam in Germany. Even Stockholm caught me off guard. What? Here? Like this?
* * * Submit Myself to the Frequencies
A few years ago, for my birthday, I was given an internet radio set. It was a bright red box with a silver knob and a little screen. Turning the knob allowed me to select any country on Earth, then a category of radio from that country, then a station belonging to that category. I chose one at random from ‘Falklands/Pop.’ A kind of armed forces station. It was playing the same music you’d find on a commercial station for a British county, songs about finding and losing love. And just like on those stations, the tracks were presented by DJs whose voices made me feel not so much that they were talking to me directly but to a club of which I was a cherished member.
Except the only mental images I have of the Falklands were those I had seen as a child, grainy footage of tanks on heaths in support of a war playing out to a backdrop of Roxy Music, Elton John and (the UK’s answer to ABBA) Bucks Fizz. Who lives in the Falklands in the 21st century and what is life like for them? It’s a superpower, overhearing the same music and information as the soldier, shopkeeper, shepherd, oilman. I’ve never met anyone who has been to the Falkland Islands. I have never read an article about the kind of food or music that is fashionable there. But the radio is there, any time I want it to be. The DJ played Lily Allen.
I turned the knob again: an R&B station in the Cayman Islands, a classical station in Beijing, a US-funded operation called Radio Free Afghanistan. I accumulated favourites. There was a Swedish community radio station that played dustbowl folk and bluegrass. There was an Icelandic station that played pop music from an alternative 1980s canon whose existence I had never suspected.
What is the thrill of radio? It’s not just the audio. That’s too simple. Perhaps it’s to do with the sense of a thing – like a sea, or a city – that is there and continues, no matter whether we encounter it. Or perhaps it’s to do with submitting to the rhythm of clock time (I tune in to the radio, and am trapped in it, but with others) rather than trying to resist (I download a podcast, and am free, but alone). ‘The motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle,’ writes Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924). Another closed circle is either cuff of a pair of handcuffs when locked. ‘Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed,’ writes Miranda July.
* * * Most Fleshy Lust
The Magic Mountain is set in a sanatorium for the tubercular in Davos, Switzerland (as I write I’m listening to Davos’ closest radio station, Radio Südostschweiz in the Alpine city of Chur, currently playing ‘Star Walkin’ by Lil Nas X). I found it difficult to get through. All those debates about Jesuitism versus humanism felt as relevant to now as a blacksmith’s fax machine. My interest levels rose, however, every time an interaction occurred between convalescent engineer Hans Castorp, our protagonist and proxy, and another patient, Clavdia Chauchat, who intrigues him with her habit of slamming the door every time she enters the dining room. The pair have one of the greatest and most frustrating literary flirtations of all time. Here’s how Castorp concludes an expansive confession of love and lust: ‘Let me touch in devotion your pulsing femoral artery where it emerges at the top of your thigh and then divides farther down into the two arteries of the tibial. Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down – oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!’
When they do kiss, the nature of the kiss is as enigmatic as the word ‘kiss’ itself. ‘Isn’t it grand, isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love – from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust?’ writes Mann. ‘The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity.’
* * * A Name that Is Barely a Name
In Paris, the businesses on the high street are not that mindful as to what they are called. There is a lot of clarity in that ambiguity. Bakeries often simply have signs advertising ‘artisanal boulangerie,’ and will be listed on Google Maps under nothing but an address. There are computer repair shops near my apartment with no web presence, and the cafés I am most interested in are those I call ‘NGEs’ or ‘nearest generic establishments.’
An NGE has a name that is barely a name, like Café Le Metro or Bar du Central. When you are thinking of where to meet someone you will rarely think of meeting in an NGE. If you do – and perhaps you have your reasons for wanting somewhere under the radar – you will say, ‘there’s a café by the church, I don’t know what it’s called but…’ An NGE has a zinc counter and, often but not always, banquette seating. Its blackboard advertises happy hour, and the beer, wine and coffee on offer are not special at all: they are liberatingly average. An NGE cares as much about trends that elevate canteen-style furniture into a modish signifier as your standard dry cleaner cares about Paris Fashion Week.
Every city has its own sort of NGE, which I am often picturing when I listen to the radio from that place. In the Jonathan Richman song entitled ‘Reno,’ he mentions a 24-hour bar where ‘the FBI meets the CIA.’ I think he means an NGE. The most important quality the NGE offers is a kind of anonymity, a namelessness (including that of its actual name) that carries through into everything else. You could be anyone, and that’s another way of saying: your past could be different to the one you actually have.
As a keepsake, before she leaves the Alpine clinic, Clavdia Chauchat gives Hans Castorp an X-ray of her skeleton. It’s an artefact swollen with symbolism, not least for revealing what is, in a sense, her deepest self, but which does so by completely anonymising her, concealing her quotidian appearance. ‘We all think we might be terrible people,’ writes Miranda July in her novel The First Bad Man (2015). ‘But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.’